Posts Tagged ‘Playdom’

Playdom, makers of the Social City hit game and one of the largest social gaming companies on Facebook, announced today that they are acquiring Merscom Games and hope to publish brand name games in the future. Merscom develops online and social games for big brands, and are currently developing games for Sea World, Purina, National Geographic and NBC Universal. The interesting element here is that Playdom plans to leverage these relationships and expand their games into big brand names using the Merscom connection.

Read more

Playdom, one of the largest social games creators on the web, announced today that they are hiring David Sobeski, a former Microsoft and Yahoo! executive, as their new Chief Technology Officer. David has been responsible for Yahoo’s data strategies and Microsoft mobility and Java strategies. He brings significant technological expertise to the social gaming sphere.
Read more

Playdom, one of the leading social game developers on the web, has announced their acquisition of the Three Melons game development company. Three Melons uses advanced technology to create social games for Facebook, and this acquisition follows recent moves by Playdom to acquire and partner with games companies.
Read more

Last week at SXSW, John Pleasants, CEO of Playdom, spoke about “The Future Of Social Gaming”, but the greatest takeaway was the current economics of Facebook Games. If you are looking to get into the business or are already a player in the space, there were a number of important facts disclosed by Pleasants. What’s clear is that the business is a smaller version of the movie industry with the difference being that games can be improved as users interact with them.
Read more

Just as farming games like (Lil) Green Patch, Farm Town and Farmville once surged in popularity, the city-building genre is rapidly gaining players. Playdom’s new Social City has gained 5,600,000 users in 2 weeks and is an excellent example of a city building game; it has great graphics, a pleasant interface and some great social features. On the other hand, the game seems to be more about the “City” and less about the “Social”. We review the game below.
Read more

Playdom, one of the top social game makers on Facebook, has acquired Washington-based Offbeat Creations. Offbeat Creations is best known for Super Farkle, a Flash-based dice game similar to Yahtzee that has grown to over 1,000,000 monthly active users. The goal of the acquisition is stated as bringing in new talent to the existing Playdom family and help Playdom expand their games offerings.
Read more

One of the more popular ways for Facebook application developers to drive traffic to their applications is through the use of Facebook advertisements. With relatively low CPMs, it’s often more cost effective than traditional cost per install campaigns as the users are also targeted based on profile data. Today TBG, the company behind the ONE Media Manager, is announcing two new clients: Playdom and Napster.
Read more

Social game developer Playdom has marked its entry into iPhone applications with the release of Mobsters: Big Apple. It links your mobile game to your online game, which is currently on MySpace. Already a social game, Mobsters was rather popular on the MySpace network, making the new iPhone game an extension of the online game version.

That means there’s a more seamless continuation of game play for users, whether they’re online or on their iPhone. It’s a smart move, as it carries over the social and gaming aspects of Mobsters, maintaining the sociability of the game itself.
Read more

Playdom has added a new executive to its core team. The social game development company announced this week that John Pleasants is Playdom’s new CEO. Coming from Electronic Arts, Inc. (EA), Pleasants has a wealth of experience in the gaming industry, and has been brought on board in part to help Playdom achieve the high growth scaling the company is currently seeking.

At EA, Pleasants acted as the President of Global Publishing and Chief Operating Officer, giving him a very high level perspective on the gaming industry as a whole. Some benefits of EA are its established presence in its respective industry, as well as its involvement with multiple aspects of gaming overall. Having witnessed the recent changes to the gaming industry over the past several years, EA has managed to shift along with the times, even trying its hand at online social gaming.
Read more

Yesterday, Playdom, formerly known as You Plus, announced their expansion from MySpace to Facebook. I took the opportunity to speak with them about their thoughts on the state of social gaming as well as the differences between building on the MySpace platform versus Facebook platform. One of the most interesting things about Playdom is that like other large social gaming networks, they have a large percentage of users returning on a daily basis.
Read more